I really like this treatment of it. I wonder if it was a precursor to Tufte's work.<p>It's important to understand the difference between an ontology/taxonomy and a process, and then apply that to your diagram metaphors.<p>A process, you should be able to script using the dot graph notation on websequencediagrams(.com). If you can't, you haven't thought through what you're doing and it's going to cost you down the road. I'd go so far as to make the provocative assertion that you only understand anything insomuch as you can represent it in a sequence diagram.<p>If you are using nested boxes, you are really using a tree graph or a digraph for an ontology/taxonomy or a sankey diagram, and the layouts of nested boxes almost never add meaningful information or make sense. They are just obfuscated graphs. Part of why I hate powerpoint is because it's designed to be stupid, because by virtue of pure survivor bias stupid is necessarily powerful, and so it only provides stupid templates.<p>The point of a visual metaphor is that the implied symmetry represents equivalence and completeness, and where it is asymmetrical, it implies there are other combinations or variations of the things you're talking about that may be options or counter cases. If it's unbalanced without specific intent, it signifies incomplete thinking.<p>If you are using nested boxes with lines between them, you're probably mixing categories and getting the conceptual equivalent to a type error. This can be a hard conversation because what the creator thinks is just an arbitrary aesthetic choice yields a gap in their logic, and that can cause them to take it very personally.